AJ & JINDER PROMOS INTER-CUT WITH SHOW-OPENING VIDEO PACKAGE- excellent! I’d like to see them do this sort of thing a lot more.

Apparently we’re getting Becky vs. Ellsworth tonight. Yes, Ellsworth. What happened was that Becky wanted a match with Carmella but Carmella offered for Becky to fight Ellsworth instead and Becky accepted and apparently Shane signed off on it. Why doesn’t Shane, a babyface, tell Carmella to woman up and fight her own battles like a f*cking adult? She’s supposed to be a G-d damn combat athlete.
Speaking of combat athletes, why don’t we take a moment to step back and look at this match that Shane has booked from a wider perspective? I am a male and Ronda Rousey is a female. I have about fifty pounds on Ronda. I’m also several inches taller than she is, plus I’m lanky, so I probably have a good few inches of a reach advantage on her. However, Ronda is a trained combat athlete and I am not, so despite my advantages in weight, leverage, and reach, if she and I were to have an MMA fight, just about the only chance I have at winning is if Ronda trips and knocks herself out before she gets to me.
Despite the infinitesimally small chance of me even so much as landing a punch on Ronda, UFC would never, ever, ever book that fight, even if I got some world-class MMA training first, and the reason for that isn’t because we’d be in different weight classes. It’s because even the mere chance of me- a man- landing one punch on Ronda- a woman- immortalized forever by the video, with the UFC logo all over the place, would not be worth the negative publicity and negative attention from politicians, activists, feminists, “family values” groups, and other such people that it would result in, even if Ronda kicked my ass for every other millisecond of that fight.
Of all of the industries that should be aware of this, it’s pro wrestling; especially when you consider that pro wrestling has been the industry that has taken the most flak for it. Hell… WWE even has special rules for matches where men and women will be on opposite sides in the same match that are specifically designed to prevent members of opposite sexes from hitting each other. And now dumbf*ck Shane has gone and booked a match where a man hitting a woman is almost a certainty. The difference in height and weight between me and Ronda is pretty similar to the differences between Ellsworth and Becky, and unlike me, Ellsworth is a trained combat athlete so I’d expect him to land a few punches. And won’t that look great to the sponsors? If there are sponsors that won’t go near WWE if there are too many boobies on display, how the hell do you think they’ll react to a man punching a woman in the face or giving her a bodyslam? Or even a TV network that pays WWE a bunch of money for their programming? That’s probably not something they’re going to want on their air. It won’t just be bad for Smackdown: it will be very bad for the entire WWE! F*cking moron.

OPENING SEGMENT-
Shane comes out and recaps the general angle as well as announcing that Bryan will be back next week. Then he brings out New Day, who he says “did a very phenomenal thing in my view last night” and “are all about fight.” He also claims that they “fired a shot across the bow of Raw last night.”
I am so sick and tired of this little f*cking piece of sh*t coming out here like him and his pals have just achieved some sort of major accomplishment when in reality they didn’t do sh*t. What did New Day do last night? They showed up, said some mean things, then they ran away. “All about fight” my ass. But in Shane McMahon’s delusional little fantasy world where he is the wise and just hero who is always right, no matter how stupid or hypocritical he is being, this was “a very phenomenal thing.” And to call this “a shot across the bow?” Do you even know that means, Shane? That means a warning shot, and it’s hard to fire a warning shot several weeks after you launched your initial assault.
They showed a replay of New Day’s antics last night and the finish of the tag title match, and everyone keeps insisting that Kurt Angle made to “look silly” or “humiliated” by New Day’s “ruse,” but I don’t see how any of that is true. Kurt reacted in the exact correct strategic manner. He marshaled all of his forces in one place so that no one could be caught alone and overwhelmed like what happened last time. Then, when he was ready to go on the offensive, he sent a large group of his troops after New Day- enough to ensure that if there was some sort of ambush and Smackdown had a bunch of guys hiding in the concourse, they’d be able to use the little hallways that go from the concourse to each section as bottle-neck to hold them off. It’s not Kurt’s fault (nor anyone one from Raw’s) that New Day got away. They had a major head start on the Raw guys who were sent to get them.
And how was this even a “ruse?” A ruse is a deception enacted to acquire a specific strategic advantage. This was just trolling. If anything, it helped Raw because it gave them an unplanned drill from which they can learn which of their defensive strategies they were able to execute well and which ones they need to practice more. The only way this could have gained Smackdown any sort of strategic advantage is if the plan was to do this feigned invasion this week and then show up for real next week but start it out just like this one started out so that Raw will think it’s just another fake and won’t show up to defend themselves, but if that’s the case then there is no way that the announcers could have known about it (because next week hasn’t happened yet!) and Shane and New Day coming out here and saying that this was a ruse gives away their plan. In order for this ruse to have been successful, it would also require Raw to treat next week’s invasion like a false alarm, but that can’t be called successful as of right now because, again, NEXT WEEK HASN’T HAPPENED YET!
And now I just realized that this probably means that next week I’m going to have to sit through Steph showing up and berating Kurt about this non-existent humiliation.
The fans are all chanting for New Day because I guess they’re happy that New Day did something that resulted in the babyfaces losing their tag titles? Idiots.
These four assholes are supposed to be babyfaces, but as they stand there running their mouths, there is nothing I want to see more in the world right now than The Shield show up and beat all four of them within of an inch of their lives. Although, to be honest, I’d even be happy if Jinder did it. Hell... if you told me right now that there was going to be an eight-man tag in which the losing team would have to leave wrestling forever, and the teams were New Day & Shane vs. Takashi Iizuka, Grado, Toru Yano, & Vinny Marseglia I would be rooting for the latter. Even if you told me that if that team lost Mike Mondo, Stephanie McMahon, P-Dawg, Cheeseburger, Delirious, and “Cauliflower” Chase Brown (a man whose gimmick is that he brings a bucket of cauliflower to the ring. Yes, really) would also leave the wrestling business forever. That’s how much I hate Shane and the New Day right now.

Well… The Shield didn’t show up to murder this human centipede of self-aggrandizement, but Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn did come out, so hopefully they’ll do something. Owens started off by declaring this segment so far to have been “the stupidest, most painful thing I have ever seen in my life.” Preach on, brother Kevin! Sami said that unlike Shane and New Day, they were “men of honor” (as compared to the Pearl Harboring of Raw that these supposed babyfaces are so proud of) and referred to the “Shane McMahon propaganda machine.” You too, brother Sami!
These guys were excellent heels. They traded barbs with New Day and it was tolerable for a bit. They said that they hoped Raw would beat Smackdown and it would be all Shane’s fault for not having them on his team. Shane responded to this by telling them off, saying “You don’t care about Smackdown. You have no brand loyalty,” and I responded by shouting “why should they?”
What has Smackdown done for Kevin Owens or Sami Zayn? Or for anyone on the roster? And what has Raw done for anyone on the Raw roster? NOTHING. WWE has done a lot for them, but “Raw” and “Smackdown” haven’t because they’re nothing more than exactly what WWE is so fond of calling them: brands. Basically the same WWE product, but with a different color scheme. If Smackdown got cancelled, WWE would just move all of the talent to Raw. If Raw got cancelled, WWE would just move all of the talent to Smackdown. Vince could show up right now and declare that next week there will be a Superstar Shakeup and the only way in which the lives of the wrestlers that get drafted will change is which random segment of their coworkers they get to see and which night of the week they have to show up.
Now if you had someone who was called up from NXT after the brand split then MAYBE you could make an argument that the authority figures in charge of the show deserve some loyalty for being the ones to give that wrestler their first break on the main roster, but even that would be mostly specious because during this brand split, the authority figures are almost never seen acting with any deliberation or shown to have any real control when it comes to roster moves. Once you get past the draft, every single roster move with the exception of the hiring of Heath Slater, Jack Swagger signing with Smackdown when his contract expired, Bobby Roode signing with Smackdown (that was the word they used) and Shane and Bryan kindly allowing Jason Jordan to go to Raw to be with his newfound real father (and, if we want to be exceedingly generous, Kurt Angle helping Smackdown sign Shelton Benjamin in exchange for that) has felt completely out of the hands of the people running the shows. The Superstar Shakeup happened literally for no reason other than Vince decided to do it, and the moves that were made were completely random within the world of kayfabe, with none of the authority figures having any inkling of who would wind up where when all was said and done, never mind having any control over any of the changes. Even worse, we weren’t even given a coherent kayfabe explanation of what the process was, so these moves between the rosters felt less like authority figures from two different teams carefully sculpting rosters of talent they believe they can bring the best out of via their various methods of motivation and more like Vince ordered everyone from both rosters to be at both shows that week and just walked around at catering dropping the Sorting Hat on random wrestlers’ heads.
NXT call-ups have been the same way. First there was Bayley, who seemed like she was assigned to Raw soon after the draft because Raw was in a situation where they needed a partner for Sasha and some higher-up well above the commissioner and GM level decided that Bayley would be the best fit. Joe was brought up by Hunter, who is also above that level. Roode said that he had been “signed” by Smackdown for a lot of money, which is the only time that it has ever been hinted at that an authority figure made any sort of effort to bring a wrestler from NXT to his/her show… which really just makes you wonder why that hasn’t happened any other time. You’d think the two shows would have been engaged in a high-stakes bidding war for the likes of Samoa Joe, Shinsuke Nakamura, Bayley, and Asuka, right? But they didn’t. Instead, they had to wait for that person to be assigned to their roster, often seemingly completely at random; the powers that be decide that a wrestler is ready to move up from NXT to the main roster so they sit the wrestler down and put the sorting hat on his/her head, then stick them on the next plane to whatever city the chosen show happens to be in that coming week.
And that’s the times where there has actually been anything resembling a kayfabe explanation for people switching shows. Other times, guys just showed up on a different show with no one batting an eyelash at it. And it’s never someone just randomly being assigned to the other show and then immediately fading into the background. It’s Kane showing up on Raw to attack Roman Reigns for no adequately explained reason, and wouldn’t you know it he ends up getting added to the main event of that weekend’s PPV where he does a big angle with Braun Strowman. Or the Bollywood Boyz showing up on Smackdown the very night that they decide to begin Jinder’s big push, and they debut by becoming his rechristened henchmen. And then you’ve got wrestlers who didn’t get drafted during the draft that were just assigned to the various shows seemingly as needed, or the rules of the draft allowing most teams and stables to stay together, but for some reason this rule didn’t apply to The Club or The Wyatt Family. Why? Because Creative decided that they wanted AJ on Smackdown without Gallows & Anderson, and that they wanted to separate Strowman from Bray.
The point of bringing all of this up is to illustrate that way the that this entire brand extension has been handled has made it feel not like these are two separate promotions making their own decisions, but like they are two wings of the same company, with some unseen higher power making all of the personnel decisions, often for reasons that only make sense if you look at things from a non-kayfabe perspective. It doesn’t feel like the Bollywood Boyz moved to Smackdown and then decided to become Jinder’s henchmen; it feels like The Bollywood Boyz were moved to Smackdown so that they could be Jinder’s henchmen. It doesn’t feel like Kane showed up on Raw and then decided to attack Braun Strowman; it feels like Kane was moved to Raw so that he could have a feud with Braun Strowman. And that feeling takes the decision-making power out of the hands of the GMs and commissioners- away from Raw and Smackdown- and puts it all into the hands of unseen WWE higher-ups. It’s WWE that control everything, so why should the wrestlers have any loyalty to one show over the other?
The only decisions that the authority figures seem to make are booking the actual shows, which is obviously very important, but I’ve never gotten the feeling that the authority figures are doing anything in particular to give the wrestlers some sort of opportunity that they wouldn’t have otherwise gotten (and thus have a reason for the wrestlers to be loyal to one brand over another). This is a show where wrestlers disappear with no explanation for months at a time. The Shining Stars might have been dead in a ditch somewhere for five months by now and we’d have never known. When was the last time that Summer Rae or Darren Young’s names were even mentioned on TV before their releases? We should probably put out a missing person’s bulletin for Dash Wilder, and I’ve heard a wacky rumor that some wrestlers spend months at a timed sucked into an alternate dimension called “WWE Main Event.” We have no way of knowing who is injured and who is just not being booked for whatever reason, and when it turns out to be the latter, the wrestler almost never comes out on TV and says “Hey, Authority Figure! What gives? Why haven’t I been booked on the show in months? Why aren’t you giving me an opportunity?” so it really doesn’t feel like the GMs are in this to help the wrestlers out, either, so- again- why should any of these wrestlers feel a particular loyalty to their brand as opposed to feeling loyalty to WWE as a whole?

Anyway, Shane calls Owens & Zayn “entitled” and books…

SAMI ZAYN (w/Kevin Owens) vs. KOFI KINGSTON (w/The New Day)- 6/10
Kofi won clean, which was 100% the wrong move here. Owens was in the ring attacking him right after the three count, which is an angle I think they’ve done three times now in the past four weeks. Owens and Zayn escape with some pathetic modicum of a sliver of heat, because that’s definitely better than Sami winning and then getting actual heat, right?

Graves is pushing that “there’s an entire Raw roster that is very, very upset that the landscape has changed thanks to The New Day.” Why should anyone other than Sheamus, Cesaro, Seth, Dean, and Roman care that New Day caused a distraction that Sheamus & Cesaro capitalized on to screw The Shied out of the tag titles? How does that affect, say, Goldust or Finn Balor or Nia Jax?

Byron said that New Day told him that the reason they have led the charge against Raw is because they want to prove that Raw made a mistake when the “Superstar Shakeup came and they tossed us away; they traded us to Smackdown,” but, again, that’s not what it felt like happened during the Superstar Shakeup at all. The fact that guys like Owens, Zayn, and the Shining Stars appeared on both Raw and Smackdown that week makes the idea of trades make no sense because it seemed like all of the decisions on who would move had been made prior to Raw starting, and if a trade had been completed before then, those guys would have been Smackdown guys at the time and thus shouldn’t have been allowed to appear on Raw. Also working against this is the fact that we don’t know who they would have been traded for. When a trade happens in a sports league, we know exactly who was traded for who. What WWE did was announce that twenty-four WWE talents had switched shows, which plays a lot more into the “powers above the authority figures are really the ones making the roster decisions” feeling than it does into anything that should make New Day feel anger towards Kurt Angle (or Steph) and Raw.
During the week of the Superstar Shakeup, I decried the lack of coherent explanation of the process, and things like are exactly why. Elements can only be used to flesh out a story if they are defined. If they’re not defined, then they don’t mean anything to your audience and thus the audience can’t understand what that those things might mean to your characters. If you show me that New Day got traded to Smackdown for Bray Wyatt and Apollo Crews- an established singles star and a guy who Kurt sees major potential in- then I can fill in the blank for myself that Kurt felt New Day was expendable because in addition to Sheamus, & Cesaro,Enzo & Cass, and The Club, he had just signed The Hardy Boyz and gotten The Revival from NXT, so he traded them for guys he thought would be game-changing singles stars. Or even if you explained to me that the Superstar Shakeup was done like an expansion draft in sports, where every team is required to divide up their roster into guys they want to keep and guys they don’t mind losing, with rules governing how many people in each division you can protect, the I can surmise that New Day was left unprotected for the above reason, and thus they might feel bitter towards Raw. But if you just have them change shows with no explanation other than “there was a Superstar Shakeup” and then six months later try tell me that they were very upset with Raw for “casting them aside” or “trading them,” I’m going to call bullsh*t because at best it feels like a bad retcon (and bad retcons are always worse when they’re done just to advance a bad story, and that’s what this Raw vs. Smackdown feud is).
And- if I may go on an artistic tangent for the moment- defining things forces you as a creator think about them. What they mean and how they fit into your world; what processes are required to drive them and what emotions and situations such things create. These things flesh out your world and make it seem more real; they force you to explore the logic of situations and make it harder to ignore the emotions that should stem from them.
And that is, unfortunately, exactly the opposite of WWE’s mentality. They want to be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want. If they want Kane to magically pop out from under the ring in a cage match on Raw one night even though he’s a Smackdown guy because they want to move him to Raw, that’s what happens. If they want Hunter and Steph to all of a sudden be married for an angle with Randy Orton then they’re just magically married again despite having had an on-screen divorce that was a major plot-point in the build to a freakin’ WrestleMania main event. If they want to shake up the rosters in a certain way then they’ll announce a Superstar Shakeup and wrestlers will just be assigned to whatever show Creative wants them to be on, with no coherent on-screen explanation of any kind. And the price they pay for that laziness is that angles like this one don’t work because by just doing things without first thinking through the logical processes and consequences of those things, you take agency away from your characters, which, in turn, denies characters the ability to react to events in the required emotional way to make their declarations not feel hollow. Hence everything on the Smackdown side of this feud- New Day’s feelings on being (apparently) “traded” to Smackdown, Shane’s whining about Raw “looking down on them,” etc. feels like something WWE pulled out of their ass because they wanted to do this big Raw vs. Smackdown angle at Survivor Series rather than something that they had previously put in place in order to set up doing a big Raw vs. Smackdown angle at Survivor Series.

They keep talking up AJ vs. Jinder, and absolutely no mention is being made of AJ vs. Rusev, the match that was announced on television last week. And even worse, the way they’re pushing AJ vs. Jinder makes it seem like AJ was given this title shot because Jinder beat him up last week, not because AJ earned a title shot by beating the Singh Brothers and Jinder jumped AJ because he thinks AJ is a big threat to his title.

RENEE YOUNG INTERVIEWS JINDER MAHAL- lame, but it kind of worked.

BLUDGEON BROTHERS PROMO- lame.

IF RUSEV WINS, HE JOINS TEAM SMACKDOWN: Rusev (w/Aiden English) vs. Randy Orton- 5.5/10
See... if you’re going to do this, why not just announce it when you announce that AJ vs. Jinder match so people aren’t left wondering if AJ is wrestling twice or if Rusev is getting screwed out of his opportunity or whatever is going on?
They fully cut away from this match just to show us Roode, Nakamura, & Shane watching backstage, and when I saw “fully cut away from this match” I mean we couldn’t even see the TV they were watching. All that was on our screens was three dudes staring at something off-camera. While there was an important wrestling match going on in the ring, that we now weren’t seeing. What sort of idiotic logic decides that this match is important enough to show us people watching it backstage, but not important enough to not cut away from?
Orton won a relatively short match with an RKO because Rusev will never be allowed to escape midcard purgatory.

ELLSWORTH & BECKY BACKSTAGE- atrocious.
This was the absolutely worst f*cking idiotic, cheap-heat, character-assassinating junk. Ellsworth is at the door to the women’s locker room waiting for Carmella to come out so they can talk about something. Becky comes out instead, so Ellsworth goes through every single sexist cliché in wrestling you can think of (“men are stronger,” “the ring is no place for a woman,” etc.). This completely out of character for Ellsworth- you know… the guy who has spent the past few months letting his girlfriend turn him into a furry just so she doesn’t dump him? It’s not that “James Ellsworth is a sexist, therefore Becky wants this match with him.” That would at least make some sense. What this was is “James Ellsworth and Becky are having a match tonight, therefore, for this one segment, we will suddenly turn James Ellsworth into a sexist so that we can get heat.”
Oh. And he’s not in the dog costume anymore for no reason. It wasn’t even commented on.

JAMES ELLSWORTH (w/Carmella) vs. BECKY LYNCH (w/Tamina, Charlotte, Lana, & Naomi)- SUPER-ULTRA DUD! (which is different from negative stars in that it’s an extreme failure, but it’s not like it was horrifically boring or sloppy or made no sense within kayfabe, but yes I hated this so much I had to invent a new rating for it)
So all of the other women in the division has heard about the previous segment so they’re at ringside to support Becky because women sticking together against sexism… but Carmella is just coming out with Ellsworth like normal. No. Not quite like normal. Like five months ago before their almost break-up. He’s regular James Ellsworth again, not her furry slave.
As Becky comes out, WWE was nice enough to remind us why this match is happening in the first place. It’s not because Ellsworth said anything misogynistic. Quite the opposite. He’s only in this match BECAUSE HIS GIRLFRIEND IS MAKING HIM (and his boss a moron and apparently signed off on it).
Now we get down to the match itself. What I was afraid was going to happen here was something akin to the feud between Disco Inferno and Jacqueline in WCW, where standard and practices wouldn’t let him do anything to her but the idiots running that company decided to book the feud anyway, so what you had was a situation where Disco- the heel- was trying his best to not fight while Jacqueline- the babyface- was attacking someone who essentially couldn’t fight back. At best, I was hoping that WWE would just make this quick, with Becky making Ellsworth tap within moments so they could say “look at us portraying women fighting sexism!” which was essentially what they were trying to do here- hence Corey Graves’ line at the end that “It’s clear that Becky Lynch and the entire Smackdown Women’s Division are to be taken very, very, seriously.”
Somehow, WWE managed to fail at this beyond my wildest expectations. Shockingly, they let Ellsworth get offense in in the form of amateur wrestling holds and takedowns. Not only that, but they actually had Ellsworth OUTWRESTLE her. Most of the time Becky started to go on offense, it came after Ellsworth gave up an advantage through cockiness. Then they had Becky kick the ring rope into his testicles, which is at the very least a shade of gray, if not outright illegal. All in all, it took Becky Lynch almost seven minutes to defeat James Ellsworth, in a match where she was outwrestled, and had to rely on shady tactics and Ellsworth’s arrogance. And this is JAMES ELLSWORTH- a comedy dork whose gimmick is that he is a loser in every possible sense of the word, who has never been portrayed as any sort of threat to any male wrestler he has ever been in the ring with! And they thought THIS would make people take the women’s division seriously? NO! The captain of the Smackdown women’s team had trouble beating the absolutely bottom of the totem pole on the men’s roster! This makes them look worse than they did before.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- a confrontation between Becky and Carmella was teased but then Carmella attacked Ellsworth instead. Hopefully this will be the last we ever see of James Ellsworth. And it only came a year too late.

SHANE MCMAHON, NATTIIE, & CHARLOTTE BACKSTAGE- Shane tells Nattie that he and Bryan didn’t like the fact that she escaped with the title at Hell in a Cell by getting herself purposely disqualified, so he’s booking her to defend the title against Charlotte next week. Nice of Shane to give Charlotte the title shot she deserves, considering that the incident being discussed only took place A WHOLE F*CKING MONTH AGO. TWO authority figures, and a situation whose solution is completely f*cking obvious is finally mentioned for the very first time thirty days after it happens. Hey, Shane! Did you ever think that sh*t like this is why everyone thinks your show isn’t as good as Raw? The fact that the people running it- and especially you- often appear to be lazy and/or stupid? Nah. It must be that the world is out to get you. That’s definitely why. Your own failures can’t possibly have been the result of your own actions. That would make you seem in some way redeemable.
And by the way, if you’re going to have Shane reiterate the obvious point that whoever comes out of that match as the champion will face Alexa Bliss! in the Champion vs. Champion match at Survivor Series, how about you deal with the not quite as obvious question of what happens to Team Smackdown if Charlotte wins the title? The obvious solution, of course, is that Nattie will take her place on the team, but if you’re going to start off this segment by having Nattie mention that she thinks Shane has called her here to tell her that he is just giving her Charlotte’s place on the team and kicking Charlotte off, why not just make this obvious solution part of the announcement of the match so that it doesn’t seem like Shane is once again too stupid to even notice the problem that would arise from Charlotte winning the title, never mind him seeming too stupid to notice the obvious solution.

WWE SMACKDOWN TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH: The Usos(c) vs. Chad Gable & Shelton Benjamin- DUD!
The Usos jump the bell on American Beta, but this is WWE so the bell doesn’t actually ring. All that happened is that it confirmed for that the Usos are still heels, and Shelton & Gable seem to be as well, so we’re getting heel vs. heel at Survivor Series no matter what, but at least unlike Miz vs. Corbin they’re all heels people actually care about and actually want to see win sometimes.
Well… that was just about the most disappointing outcome possible. What happened was that Gable gave the legal Uso a chop block on the outside and the Usos got counted out in just a few minutes. It does let you keep the Usos as champions for the PPV while keeping Gable & Benjamin hot as challengers so there is some logic to it, but it was a very disappointing outcome for a match they’ve been building up for weeks.

RENEEE YOUNG INTERVIEWS AJ STYLES- very good

WWE WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE MATCH: Jinder Mahal(c) (w/the Singh Brothers) vs. AJ Styles- 8/10
The Singh Brothers have interfered in every one of Jinder’s title defenses so far. They even each tried to interfere in the other’s match against AJ over the past two weeks… and yet they’re not barred from ringside here, even though in those aforementioned AJ vs. Singh Brothers matches, Jinder, who has much less of a history of interfering, was barred from ringside preemptively.
They actually used Jinder’s giant muscles to tell a story here, which is why AJ is so damn great. This story, a well-built match, and a hot crowd contributed to the best match of Jinder’s career, which also turns out to be the final match of his title reign.
I know I should be happy not only that the belt is off of Jinder, but also that we’re now getting Brock vs. AJ at the PPV instead of Brock vs. Jinder, but I just can’t, and there are two reasons for that. The first is that after the Joe and Strowman matches, it’s clear to me that this match is not going to be anything close to what I want it to be. AJ is just going to be another guy Brock dominates in Vince’s desperate scheme to make people like Roman by letting Roman beat Brock, even though it should be clear to Vince by now that this will not change anyone’s stance on Roman in the slightest.
The second reason is that I think this title change was not done for AJ’s benefit, but rather for Jinder’s. Now Jinder doesn’t have to lose to Brock, and Jinder can go and win the belt back in India, blow-off with AJ at the Rumble, and lose to conquering hero John Cena at Mania. Don’t get me wrong: it was also done to pop the crowd in the UK, set up for the title change in India so they can start pushing the “worldwide” nature of the title with these two switches outside of North America, to create the expectation of title changes on next week’s SD now that we’ve had one on each show this week, and to improve the Survivor Series card, but it is not being done for AJ’s benefit. John Cena gets to be Sting, finally beating Hollywood Hulk Jinder at Starrcade. AJ is Lex Luger, getting a quickie title reign in preparation for the heel winning it right back.

Another terrible episode of Smackdown despite the awesome main event. Every week this show seems to find new ways to suck.

I'd even go on to say that AJ definitely coached/advised Jinder Mahal on a lot of that match in general, because none of that is shit he's ever even tried on anyone else.

If that's the case, why couldn't he and other great wrestler, Nakamura do some shit like that? I did like the catching and flinging out by the neck spot, and the Stunner down over the ropes in the corner.

Yeah, this SS, as Cero and I have been stating, definitely is way too rushed.